WEARABLE SOUND

[defrog]

ITEM: Yoel Fink, an associate professor of materials science and principal investigator at MIT's Research Lab of Electronics, has been working to develop fabrics that can detect and produce sound, and interact with their environment.

They’re called acoustic fibers, and potential applications for include turning clothes into microphones, for capturing speech or monitoring bodily functions, tiny filaments that could measure blood flow in capillaries or pressure in the brain, or loose nets that monitor the flow of water in the ocean and large-area sonar imaging systems with much higher resolutions.

In other words, in future yr t-shirt will not only monitor yr vital signs but also serve a a mike for yr augmented-reality goggles. Maybe.

Also, the fibers can produce sound as well.

"You can actually hear them, these fibers," says Chocat, a graduate student in the materials science department. "If you connected them to a power supply and applied a sinusoidal current" — an alternating current whose period is very regular — "then it would vibrate. And if you make it vibrate at audible frequencies and put it close to your ear, you could actually hear different notes or sounds coming out of it."

I am now imagining the impact of this on amplification systems at rock concerts, wherein the audience becomes a sort of collective Marshall stack.

FROOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

Okay, it may take another 30 years to get there. Still, wonderful things we can do with technology these days.

Pret a porter,

This is dF

Comments

[drhoz.livejournal.com]

love the name :D